


I'm Just Fine

by Geonn



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Lesbian Relationship, Canonical Character Death, Episode: s05e10 The Day the World Went Away, F/F, Missing Scene, Sad, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 16:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7059760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geonn/pseuds/Geonn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows what's happening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Just Fine

She sees them loading Harold into the police car and she knows, no matter what happens when they reach their destination, he’ll find a way to get out. The Machine will find a way to get him out to continue this fight. The war isn’t ending on this quiet street. She’s fine with that.

Her mind begins to drift as they’re putting her into the ambulance and she knows that she’s thinking, feeling, knowing her last thoughts. She feels the blood pooling inside of her clothes, feels the pain that her adrenaline hid from her, and she knows these aren’t wounds that will get patched up. She took these injuries for Reese, for Harold, for Lionel, for Sameen and the Machine. She bleeds so they can continue the fight. She’s fine with that.

She was a child, lost and alone and frightened. She was trying to do the right thing when she saw a wrong, and no one listened to her. She was called a liar. She was called a troublemaker. She faced hateful eyes every time she went into the library, her sacred sanctum with so many books and the computers that could connect her to a larger world. But they gave her justice after so many years without closure. Harold and John came into her life meaning to stop her, to kill her if necessary, but they gave her the greatest gift she could have asked for. They put Hannah to rest and the bill finally came due. She’s fine with that.

They operate on her. They try to put the broken pieces back together but there’s just too much damage. A doctor cuts away her blouse and whispers, “Jesus,” when she sees the other bullet wounds marking her patient’s flesh. Shoulder. Stomach. Hip. Chest shoulder arm just below the breast just above the navel. Scars and bullet wounds and cuts that all healed, and now she’s finally received the wounds that won’t. She’s fine with that.

She doesn’t like it. She doesn’t relish the knowledge that the pain giving way to blissful numbness is her body and brain shutting down. If she was conscious enough, she would cry at the thought of saying goodbye to all the beauty she’s discovered in the world since she found the Machine, but she’s beyond that. Beyond pain and loss. 

The little girl who hid behind a name she gave to herself, who never trusted anyone and never allowed herself to love or be loved, had grown to become the person she created. She was Root, Samantha Groves long-ago buried and forgotten. She became the person she always dreamed of being. She was Root and she was loved. Harold loved her as a nemesis, a friendly rival. John loved her as a brother loved his destructive little sister. Bear loved her unconditionally. 

And Sameen.

Sameen loved her like someone else would love a thunderstorm. She loved Shaw as the eye of a hurricane. They were forces of nature that no one else could touch but somehow they blended together in a beautiful symphony of destruction. There was no wrong in the devastation wrought by a thunderstorm or a hurricane. It was just the nature of the beast. They had stood in each other’s swirling vortices and found calm, peace, comfort, and love. It was a kind of love she’d never known existed so she’d never bothered to look for it. 

The doctors fill her with blood that she’ll only lose again. Her body is jarred back from the brink, a charge coursing through her body so it would still be mechanically alive even when the spark that made her a person was already leaving. The world hums around her. The voices fade out until the only sound is in her right ear, the deaf ear, the implant buzzing with the energy from the paddles they’d just zapped her with.

_“Can you hear me?”_

It’s her voice. It’s Her voice.

_“I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”_

She would smile if she could. Tears are in her eyes and roll down her cheeks; it’s just gravity.

_“Thank you. For everything.”_

Everything is dark now. She sees Sameen and wishes they’d had more time, even as she knows the time they had was a miraculous gift. She sees the years she spent alone thinking that was the way it would always have to be and is grateful for the short time she spent in the library and the subway with her friends. Her friends, all of whom had shot or shot at her over the years. 

_“Can you hear me?”_ She asks again.

Her eyes open. The lights over the bed are flaring, but it may only be in her mind. The world seems vast and it seems to have been confined to this room. The voice echoing in her head isn’t hers. It belongs to the god she spent her entire life searching for, the deity she freed from chains and protected and for whom she advocated until Her creator saw the light and did the right thing. She went on a quest to free god and she’d succeeded. 

She saw god, and god saw her, and now after everything, that god was acknowledging her good works by taking her voice. 

“Absolutely,” she whispers.

Her eyes close. The voice fades, the sound of machinery and doctors and nurses fade until there is nothing. No pain, no urgency, no sense of feeling at all. She knows she isn’t breathing anymore. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal now. She knows she’s spoken her last word, but it was a good last word, and it was a farewell to the god she had trusted with her life time and time again.

She was fine with that.


End file.
